Michael Collier

To a Horseshoe Crab

Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets who live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe.

You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail.

Often you die still attached, fucked but not fucking, though once I watched the loved one drag her expired lover in a circle before she died too.

And sometimes in your death throes you capsize on the sand, which means you turn up not down and your legs row at nothing so for a while you keep the flies away but not the merciless fleas.

for José Emilio Pacheco

Michael Collier“To a Horseshoe Crab” first appeared inPloughshares, Spring 2007.